Sunday, August 5, 2007

The KabukiKos Konfab

Predictably, the news media sanitized the convention of liberal bloggers this weekend in Chicago called the YearlyKos. I don't recall any tough questions to the convention goers about the vitriol posted daily on the DailyKos, and I didn't see any stories asking the lefties about credible reports that say the surge in Iraq is proving successful.

Nah, that would ruin the good time they were all having basking in the glow of the news media attention and pandering by Democratic presidential candidates. We can all ponder on a Sunday afternoon whether the national media would have been so uncritical of an emerging right wing blogger/grassroots movement.

It was all Kabuki Theater, anyway. While the nutroots were celebrating the explosion of "New Media," they were vehemently opposing the terrorists using New Media to communicate their plots to kill us by the thousands. While the convention was rolling, the DailyKos was challenging Congress to reject allowing our government to intercept potential terrorist communications that originate overseas and intersect with our communications network. Because President Bush was supporting the surveillance, DailyKos opposed it, no matter how many innocent American lives it might save. In other words, the Kossites were saying "screw them" to not Red America or Blue America, but Sane America. Fortunately, the Senate and then the House sided with Sane America and approved the measure.

YearlyKos' brand of democracy also didn't extend to those who expressed the opinion that the war surge may be working. A panel moderator shouted down a military man who expressed those views, saying it was inappropriate for the man to be expressing them wearing the uniform. Problem is, the panel moderator has a website where he is pictured wearing the uniform espousing his anti- Iraq war views. A message thread criticizing YearlyKos for this censorship was promptly censored from the site.

It's funny, because an Illinois blogger misread my earlier post about the upcoming convention, saying I wanted to stifle the First Amendment because I wanted the news media to treat the YearlyKos like it would a conservative political movementâ€”critically. The only suppression of the First Amendment in Chicago this weekend that I know of occurred at McCormick Place.